Steve Nash doesn't know when he'll come back, how he'll feel or whether he can be an effective player again. There is one certainty for the Lakers point guard: He's not contemplating retirement because of persistent back pain that has sidelined him for nearly two weeks. "No, not at all," Nash said Friday of rumors he is considering calling it a career long before his contract expires at the end of next season. "I don't know where that came from. "For me, I realize I have about 18 months left of basketball and I want the most out of this that I can possibly get and I don't know if that's going to be one game or the vast majority of what's left, but I have a long life without basketball, so I don't want to give in too soon.

PORTLAND, Ore. - If you had to trace the arc of Steve Nash's season of disappointment, you would start here. His tenure as a Laker wasn't even a game and a half old when Portland's Damian Lillard kneed the veteran point guard in the left leg on Halloween night, giving Nash's teammates a major scare. Nash was expected to miss only about a week because of a small fracture in his left leg but in fact sat out nearly two months after developing nerve damage. It was emblematic of a season of unforeseen complications that preceded Nash's return to the Rose Garden on Wednesday night.

Restoring sensation and use to limbs paralyzed by nerve damage has been one of medicine's greatest challenges. Although physicians can reattach severed or crushed nerves by using microsurgery techniques, such a damaged limb rarely fully recovers. Scar tissue often blocks the patch of the nerve sensations, and the nerve endings themselves rarely reattach themselves properly.

Ron Mass' appearance lays bare what he has endured. The skin on his face is smoother now, no longer the charcoal black it was before the grafts or the blotchy red that followed. His arms are a donors' medley of white, pink and brown. And from a distance the bandage over his chest looks like a T-shirt. The Nov. 2 brush fire that raged through Topanga Canyon seared 90% of his body.

February 2, 1989 | JAN HOFMANN, Jan Hofmann is a regular contributor to Orange County Life.

"Hit me--I need the money." If you're one of the people who drive around with those words affixed to your bumper, we have to talk. In 1986-87, the most recent period for which numbers are available, 90,839 people in California filed suit after automobile accidents. According to Patty Lombard, a spokeswoman for the Western Insurance Information Service in Tustin, the figure includes injury, death and property damage claims. That works out to an average of 16.

Researchers have found a whole new level of damage in babies born to mothers who drank heavily during pregnancy -- this time to the nerves in their arms and legs. The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, is the first to look beyond the well-known damage to the brain and spinal cord in babies of mothers who drink and to find damage outside the central nervous system.

Impotence drugs such as Viagra and Cialis can increase the risk of eye damage in men who have a history of heart disease or high blood pressure, researchers reported Tuesday in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. In a small study, scientists at the University of Alabama in Birmingham found that men who had suffered a heart attack were 10 times more likely to have a form of optic nerve damage called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy if they had been taking anti-impotence pills.

There was no reading, writing or arithmetic Thursday morning at Joshua Tree Elementary School, a dusty collection of prefabricated buildings overlooking one of the many earthquake faults that crisscross this high desert outpost. Nearly half of the school's 750 boys and girls never showed up for class, their parents too afraid to let them out of their sight.

A Florida surgeon accused Rampart Division police officers Tuesday of pulling him over on the Santa Monica Freeway last month because he is black and handcuffing him so tightly that he suffered nerve damage in his wrists. Dr. Angelo E. Gousse, a urology specialist who also teaches at the University of Miami medical school, filed a claim Tuesday against the Los Angeles Police Department, accusing officers of racial profiling and excessive force.

A man in his early 70s hadn't spoken in two years, for reasons unknown to his doctors. Then Connie Tomaino, a music therapist, noticed he was listening to the Yiddish folk songs she played for him and her other neurologically impaired geriatric patients. Soon, whenever she played the folk songs he began to cry. Then he started to hum along with the music. After two months he began to speak.